Flashback

We’ll be moving at first light. Perdita assured us that with the recon helicopter and our convoy’s firepower, there shouldn’t be a serious confrontation—just ten hours of bumping and jolting along in the truck’s lowest gears.

Val said to me tonight—

—This is like those old World War Two B-seventeen movies the Old Man and I used to watch. These convoys are like those packs of bombers huddled together for protection against German fighter planes.

It was the first time in several years that I’d heard Val mention his father without overt hostility.

The cooking fires were doused by 9 p.m. tonight and there was no frivolity around the campfires. The mood was somber. There was no bluster. Everyone knows that tomorrow will be one of the most dangerous parts of the voyage but there’s almost no talk of it. Plans and preparations have been made.

I’m terrified about tomorrow’s slow, exposed twenty-nine-mile gauntlet, but Val seems quietly excited… almost enthusiastic. The immortality of youth, I suppose.

Later tonight, when everyone had turned in, I talked to him after I saw him shutting off the little cell phone he’d brought along and removing the earbud.

I’d noticed the old phone our second night out and challenged Val about it—he had, after all, insisted that I throw away my phone because it might be tracked by authorities chasing him—and he’d explained how it had been his mother’s, and how all of the phone and GPS chips had long since been removed. Reluctantly, he told me that he listened to the daily diary function on it just to hear his mother’s voice.

This fact made my chest ache.

Val was willing to say more. I’m fairly certain that his good mood and talkativeness were a direct result of the marijuana joint that he’d joined Julio and Henry Big Horse Begay and Gauge Devereaux and Cooper Jakes in smoking just an hour earlier around the last campfire of the evening. It had been my impression that Val had been using a lot of flashback over the past few years and perhaps some stronger drugs such as cocaine from time to time—I wasn’t sure about the latter—but had never got in the habit of smoking pot with his friends.

So now, in our high cots under the clear Kevlarglas air dam with the stars bright above us—the surprisingly effective acoustic curtain drawn between our cots and the Romanos’ bed below—Val gave me a very un-Val-like loopy smile and showed me the phone.

—It was my mom’s, your… you know. So like I said, it doesn’t have any of the trackable, traceable chips left in it—I pulled them out myself five years ago—but it’s got her daily voice reminders and a lot of text diary that I’d like to read but can’t.